The gamification market starts to grow as new companies use it as a loyalty differential

Gamification platforms have raised over $30 million this year (source: Gabe Zichermann is chair of the Gamification Summit, an entrepreneur, and author of Gamification By Design and Game-Based Marketing).

New business start-ups are using gamification from the start to develop loyalty. One example is flickme.com, which is a new streaming film rental/buying site which is also accessible via Facebook. It assigns a Beta badge for being an early adopter. Completing certain tasks earns one badges and points. There’s a set of leaderboards. 

 
By 2015 70 percent of the Global 2000 will use gamification (Source Gartner Group) spending over $1.6 billion in the U.S.A alone (source M2 Research). 

Gamification is changing loyalty marketing and social engagement

Source: BizReport article by Kirstina Knight

Gamification is helping to rebuild the loyalty space. Gamification makes it simpler for brands to engage and for consumers to earn rewards. This, of course, keeps the consumer coming back.

Here are some of the highlights from the article:

1. Gamification is another form of loyalty … identity is now available on the web because of sites like Facebook and Twitter. 
2. The social graph is a major accelerant to the value of social rewards and behaviour. 
3. Gamification can be about loyalty or engagement. 
4. Finding ways to make social experiences meaningful and exciting is a major trend and it's falling under the umbrella of gamification. 
5. Expect to see even deeper social capabilities. 
6. Right now, Gamification 1.0 is about status, reputation, points, level, achievements--powerful motivating sources of behaviour. The next phase is making those much more social, akin to how social gaming elevated gaming and transformed the industry.

Dreamforce 2011 Gamification

Gamification was mentioned quite a lot but lacked substance. Looked at the Bunchball offering for the sales funnel but I would say it is early days.

It has become clear that there is a big difference between Consumer Gamification and Enterprise Gamification. Consumer Gamification is quite advanced but experts are struggling with Corporate Gamification ... this is a great area to evolve.

Dreamforce 2011: 50%+ CRM is sub optimal because of data quality issues

According to industry analyst, Gartner Group, more than 50% of customer relationship management deployments will suffer limited acceptance, if not outright failure, due to lack of attention to data quality issues.

The impact of poor data quality is far reaching and its affects are both tangible and intangible. If data quality problems are allowed to persist, management grow to mistrust the information in the CRM and will be reluctant to use it for decision-making.

This evidence shows there is a growing need to have a more 'intelligent' implementation of CRM.

Intelligent CRM needs a combination of lead indicators, corporate gamification as a behavioural rewards system and a cultural change programme as a must have to drive high standards of CRM data quality.  

 

Gamification Levels for high end employee engagement

This video shows the use of Levels in gamification http://iactionable.com/salesforce/

iActionable claim engaged employees are 43% more productive, generate 23% more revenue and are 87% less likely to leave by using gamification for high end employee engagement.

Use gamification to motivate the sales team

Bunchball is using Salesforce.com for gamification to improve sales people performance.

Bunchball has a family of gamification applications called Nitro Elements, built atop Nitro, its general purpose platform for adding game features to websites and applications. Nitro can be used in Salesforce that uses elements like competition, rewards, and rankings to influence behaviour.

The priority nowadays is the motivation of the sales team.

Salespeople are naturally competitive, and they will be motivated to play the game even harder, and have more fun doing it, given an easy way of seeing where they rank in the standings. Beyond individual competition, Nitro for Salesforce can rank teams of salespeople based on their collective performance.

In addition to closing deals, salespeople can get recognition for Chatter activity or other behaviours management wants to reinforce.

Gamification is a key element of Intelligent CRM. It needs to be linked with Lead Indicators and incentives to influence behaviour and share knowledge. We would expect this focus to grow rapidly in the next two years.